A single bullet from an AK-47 can take down an Old Huey helicopter..my .38 can wreck the average street bike.

Most of the time incoming fire hits sheet metal and not much else. In game terms, the attack was not successful. the "damage" is purely cosmetic.

Exactly. Some kinds of hits add up -- a single hit to a fuel tank will start a slow leak that eventually disable a vehicle through fuel loss, but a bunch of fuel tank hits will drain it quickly. Some hits disable a vehicle quickly, such as a hit to a fuel line or a driver wound. Some impair a vehicle in a specific way without fully disabling it, such as flattening tires, disabling brakes, obscuring view through windows, etc. Those don't play well with most game rules.

A single bullet from an AK-47 can take down an Old Huey helicopter..my .38 can wreck the average street bike.

Most of the time incoming fire hits sheet metal and not much else. In game terms, the attack was not successful. the "damage" is purely cosmetic.

Exactly. Some kinds of hits add up -- a single hit to a fuel tank will start a slow leak that eventually disable a vehicle through fuel loss, but a bunch of fuel tank hits will drain it quickly. Some hits disable a vehicle quickly, such as a hit to a fuel line or a driver wound. Some impair a vehicle in a specific way without fully disabling it, such as flattening tires, disabling brakes, obscuring view through windows, etc. Those don't play well with most game rules.

Os vehicles are big metal boxesful of totally unimportant( to the operation of the vehicle) things, with a few interesting bits located in various places. mosy of te time a larger vehicle has more places to shoot full of holes without actually disabling the vehicle.

it breaks down into
Power
Drive
Suspension
Controls
Structure
On a Vespa scooter, it's hard to hit anything without it being both important and fragile.A single .22 Long rifle hitting anywhere is likely to break something. On a MACK truck ,there is more "empty" space where even a .50 caliber round can pass through without breaking an important bit.

the important bits are larger and more robust in general. It takes a bigger dose of kinetic energy to crack the block of a diesel engine in a truck than it does to break the block of a vespa scooter. But some of those bits are the same a hit to the radiator of a Mack Truck will put it out of action in a matter of minutes,

ON top of that non combat vehicles are not designed to take any sort of damage to the working parts at all. they are made of the cheapest and lightest materials the engineers could make work, and have little or no tolerance for damage.

I noticed the same problem with 2nd edition vehicles: They are far too squishy. An unarmed Traveller can use his fist to destroy a grav cycle or ground car or air raft more easily than he can beat up another Traveller. Similarly, some of the spacecraft are a bit squishy, what with having Armour 0, they can be easily damaged by character-scale weapons, though it takes longer to destroy them because of the x10 damage scale factor.

This is the simplest best solution that I could come up with:

Add +6 Armour and +6 Hull to all vehicles, and +1 Armour and +1 Hull to all spacecraft (that's +10 each on the character scale).

It's easy to remember, and if you do this for every vehicle and ship stat block, it keeps their comparative defenses relatively balanced.

Add +6 Armour and +6 Hull to all vehicles, and +1 Armour and +1 Hull to all spacecraft (that's +10 each on the character scale).

It's easy to remember, and if you do this for every vehicle and ship stat block, it keeps their comparative defenses relatively balanced.

But that would be going backwards...

I still use the 1st edition rules where it was 3 damage to for each vehicle hit.

I don't know what you mean by "backwards", but the 1st edition's 3 damage per vehicle hit also looks like a good way to go.
It would make tough vehicles proportionately tougher, rather than just a set amount tougher.
We need to see which "fix" works better in play.

I still use the 1st edition rules where it was 3 damage to for each vehicle hit.

I don't know what you mean by "backwards", but the 1st edition's 3 damage per vehicle hit also looks like a good way to go.
It would make tough vehicles proportionately tougher, rather than just a set amount tougher.
We need to see which "fix" works better in play.

Sorry, the Earlier comment about being backward was harking back to a heated exchange during the playtest of Vehicles for 2nd edition.

For a better fit with MgT2 you might want to tweak the modifiers for the Open Frame option. I think the points of Hull per Space for the different Frame types was supposed to do something similar but maybe it didn’t quite hit the mark.

I like the proposal for spacecraft but I propose adjusting it based on hull material. The modifier looks appropriate for crystalliron hulls but might be too much for lower-tech hull material.

I’m a little torn on this. Totally on board with the thought that you should not be able to disable a grav bike with an unarmed attack so IMTU I’d probably just declare you can’t do that (and if you’re hand isn’t protected you should take damage for the attack). But put a blade or club in that hand and I think i’d allow damage to the vehicle but limited only to certain systems - you could break a window with a club but not damage a tire, for example.

What about simply deducting 1D from the attack damage and if the damage dice go to zero the attack can’t affect most structures? Attacks with the AP trait might be immune from this (or not - that might make them too powerful). Natural attacks might be an exception.